Chapter 9
The phone rang. It was Mom.
I knew before I picked it up. Mom didn't call when she didn't have to.
"Mom."
"Beau." She was crying.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. "Mom, what’s wrong?"
"He's not speaking, Beau."
I sat very still. "Okay."
"He hasn't spoken since last night. He won't open his eyes. It feels like — it feels like his soul is leaving him slowly. The doctors are telling us to start preparing."
"Preparing?"
"For after."
I didn't ask her what after meant. I knew what it meant. "Okay, Mom."
"Are you coming over?"
I closed my eyes.
I had a date.
I had a child I'd been excited to see, a wrapped book on the kitchen counter I'd been thinking about for days, and the prospect of this aquarium with Sabrina tucked away like a coupon I was finally going to spend.
"Beau."
"Yeah?"
"Are you coming?"
I pictured the room — the blue light from the TV, my father's face thinner than the last time I'd seen it, Mom in the chair with the cardigan on the wrong way around. I pictured walking in and my father not opening his eyes when I called him.
I couldn't. I just wasn't strong enough to take it. "Mom, I have a thing today. I'll be there tonight."
"Beau — "
"I'll be there. I promise."
I sat on the edge of the bed for a while after the call ended.
I told myself, with what was left of my charm running, that I was doing this for them. The kid was excited. Sabrina had — against her better judgment — said yes. The book I got as a gift for Bonnie was right there on the counter, wrapped in brown paper, but I knew I was lying.
I was going because the aquarium wasn't the hospital, and I needed to be in a room where I didn't have to witness my dad disappearing slowly. I needed to breathe.
I got dressed and went.
I pulled up early at her building and sat in the car.
The book was on the passenger seat, wrapped in brown paper because I'd run out of nicer paper, tied with a red ribbon I'd practiced the knot on four times.
I'd picked it up at the bookstore on Baker and Fourth before my mother's call had pulled the morning out from under me.
I waited until I was almost not early anymore. I went up.
Sabrina opened the door.
She was in jeans and a soft gray sweater I hadn't seen on her, and her hair was down — loose, long, dark curls past her shoulders, the first time I'd seen it down at all — and the sight of her struck a chord somewhere deep in my chest and left it ringing.
She looked like a person who could push the hospital out of my head.
Bonnie appeared at her elbow. Yellow hoodie with a pocket on the front, jeans, and sneakers I hadn't previously seen. Her ponytail was tied neatly.
She looked up at me. "Hi."
"Hi, Bonnie."
"Are we going?"
"In a minute. I have something for you first."
I crouched down to her eye level and held out the package. "I got this for you."
She unwrapped it slowly, working the ribbon off first, putting the ribbon in the front pocket of her hoodie — saving it for later — and then she unfolded the brown paper without ripping it.
The book was a hardcover, big-format, marine biology illustrated guide, specifically on cephalopods. The cover had a giant Pacific octopus with all its arms.
Bonnie went very still.
She read the title and subtitle, traced one of the octopus's arms with her finger, then looked up at me, eyes gleaming.
"I haven't read this one."
"I know. I figured you liked octopuses."
She nodded once. Then she stepped forward, put both arms around my neck, and hugged me tight.
"Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!"
She let me go and held the book against her chest with both arms.
I stood up.
Sabrina was leaning on the doorframe with one shoulder, her arms crossed.
"Cross."
"Yeah?"
"Don't make her like you any more than she already does."
I let myself smile. "No promises."
We drove out of the city. The aquarium was in the harbor. Bonnie was in the back seat with the book on her lap, reading aloud — fast, calling out facts to the front seat as she went.
"Mom, they have an arm that's a tongue."
"They do?"
"They taste with their suckers."
"That's a lot, baby."
"Beau."
I caught Bonnie's eye in the rearview. "Yeah?"
"Did you know an octopus has three hearts?"
I thought for a second.
Three hearts. A creature with three hearts and a daughter in the back seat with one that wasn't quite working. I took a breath and came back.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Two pump blood through the gills, and one pumps blood through the rest of the body.”
“That’s important information for me to have.”
“I’m telling you because it’s important.”
Sabrina was watching the side of my face. I caught it in the corner of my eye. She didn’t say anything, and she turned her head forward.
“How’s the tyrant?” I asked her.
“Excuse me?”
“Pickles. The cat. Your tyrant.”
She pretended to consider. “Pickles is well and is at home with Mrs. Park, ruling the apartment in our absence.”
“Does he like me yet?”
“Pickles only likes anyone who feeds him, actually.”
I turned the steering wheel. “He’ll come around.”
“He won’t.”
“He will. They all do.”
“Cross.”
“Eventually.” I winked.
She kept her eyes on the windshield. “They won’t.”
“They will. Sometimes it takes years.”
“Mm-hmm.”
The aquarium's lobby smelled of salt, and sunscreen. Bonnie looked up at the giant fish-tank wall above the front desk and stopped walking.
“Mom, look!”
“I see them, baby. Yes, they are inside the wall.”
I paid for the tickets, and Sabrina didn’t argue. She let me have it and I was glad.
At the touch tank, Bonnie put both hands in up to the elbow without prompting.
The tank had bat stars, a horseshoe crab, and a sea cucumber the size of a forearm.
I leaned over the rail beside her and named what we were seeing, and Sabrina stood on my other side, arms crossed, her expression saying she was prepared to have a hand washed if it came to that.
I put my hand at the small of her back without thinking about it.
She didn’t move.
“Sea cucumber,” Bonnie said. She was studying it with the suspicion she usually saved for her mother’s reasoning. “It looks like — ”
“Don’t say it.”
“A — ”
“Don’t, Bonnie.”
I looked at Sabrina. She was looking dryly at the sea cucumber.
“It’s a sea cucumber,” she said. “A vegetable that lives in the sea. Move on.”
I sneaked a kiss at the corner of her mouth.
I didn’t plan to. The kiss came up before I decided to do it, and she let me, and when I pulled back, her ear was a quarter inch redder than it had been a moment ago.
At the kelp forest exhibit, I named what we were seeing — leopard sharks, garibaldi, the surfperch threading through the kelp — and Sabrina turned her head to look at me.
“How do you know what those are?”
“I read.”
“You read?”
“I read up before today.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You studied for this?”
“Yes.”
“You studied for an aquarium date?”
“Yes.” I nodded.
She didn’t say anything for a second. Then she said, quieter, “Thank you.”
I held her hand on the way to the next exhibit.
At the jellyfish exhibit, the lights were blue, and the jellyfish were the color of glass. Bonnie was bent over the placard, sounding out bioluminescence, and I kissed the top of Sabrina’s head as she leaned over it beside Bonnie.
She looked up at me, didn’t say anything, and put her hand in my back pocket.
The octopus tank was in the back. The room was dark, and the tank lighting was a soft greenish gold, and the octopus was — at first — not visible at all.
“Where is she?” Bonnie asked.
“Maybe in the rocks.”
“Where in the rocks?”
I crouched next to her and pointed. “There.”
In a crevice in the back of the tank, one orange arm was visible against the rock. Bonnie went still. The arm moved. A second arm came around the corner. A third. Then the body — the bulbous, intelligent, watching head — emerged from the crevice and moved across the back of the tank.
Bonnie didn’t breathe.
“Mom.” She didn’t turn her head. “Mom.”
“Yeah, baby?”
“She is right there.”
“She is.”
“She is so beautiful.”
The octopus moved up the back wall and paused. It looked briefly at Bonnie. Bonnie was an inch from the glass.
“Mom.”
“Yeah, baby?”
“I love her.”
Sabrina smiled. A real smile this time, soft and unguarded, and I couldn't take my eyes off her.
The gift shop was at the end of the hall. Bonnie went in like she had a list. She walked the aisles and came back with a stuffed octopus the size of a basketball, plush, eight arms, and two embroidered eyes, and she held it up to me without a word.
“Walter?” she asked. “Is it Walter the octopus?”
“Yes, Walter,” I replied. “It’s perfect. You know Walter is going to have to ride in the back seat with you.”
“He will? Really?”
I bought Walter, the cephalopod sticker book Bonnie had also acquired in passing, the dolphin keychain she had selected for her teacher, and a sea otter refrigerator magnet for Mrs. Park. Sabrina watched me put my card down without arguing. The argument was for lunch.
At lunch, she insisted.
The fish-and-chips counter was on the harbor with picnic benches and seagulls, and Sabrina ordered three baskets of food, put her card down, and said, “I’m buying lunch, Cross. Don’t make me say it twice.”
“Okay, ma'am.”
“Glad you didn’t even argue. You would’ve lost.”
“I’m picking my battles,” I said, holding my arms up.
“You’re a smart man.” She tipped her chin up at me, satisfied, and went to get napkins.
Bonnie sat across from me, Walter beside her, her sticker book open. She was talking — through bites of fish, through pauses for fries, through the seagull that came too close and got a side-eye for it — and what she was talking about was the jellyfish room.
“Did you know jellyfish don’t have brains?” she asked.
“I didn’t know that,” I replied.
“They have a nervous system. A net. It goes through their whole body.”
“That seems efficient.”
“They have been around for six hundred and fifty million years.”
“Older than the dinosaurs.”
“Older than every dinosaur combined.”